Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de Gerville
| Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de Gerville |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
September 19, 1769 Gerville-la-Forêt (Manche) |
| Died | July 26, 1853 (aged 83) Valognes (Manche) |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | antiquarian, historian, naturalist, archaeologist |
Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de Gerville (Gerville-la-Forêt (Manche) 19 September 1769 — Valognes (Manche) 26 July 1853) was a scholarly French antiquarian, historian, naturalist and archaeologist from an aristocratic family of Normandy. His earliest concerns were with natural history and botany and his numismatic collection, but he became one of the small group forming the first architectural historians in France.
His early studies were at the college of Coutances, followed by studies in the law at Caen. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, he joined other aristocratic emigrés, travelled in England and fought in the First Coalition or "Army of the Princes" and did not return until 1801, when he settled once again on his family estates at Gerville in Normandy and devoted his leisure to pursuing the local history of the Cotentin, from an antiquarian point of view. In 1811 he moved to Valognes (Manche), pursuing botanical field research and the nascent field of geology, and searching out ancient written materials that cast light on local history, while he undertook, from 1814 onwards, to compile a pioneering inventory of some four or five hundred churches of La Manche (Noell 2005); some of these materials were published as Voyage archéologique dans la Manche (1818–1820). He and his fellow members in the Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, founded in 1824— the abbé Gervais de la Rue in Rouen, Auguste Le Prévost and Arcisse de Caumont— virtually formed a "travelling school of architectural connoisseurship" (Noell).
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